Category: Academia

Do any of you watch Better Call Saul? You should. It’s an excellent piece of drama (what else would you expect from Breaking Bad‘s Vince Gilligan?) about the eponymous Saul Goodman – Jimmy McGill – in his early days on his path to become a lawyer. Anyhoo, without spoiling it too much, in one of the last episodes of the season one of the characters launches into a brilliant motive rant, concluding with the phrase, “The law is sacred.”

That got me thinking, as it’s not the first time I’ve heard that phrase – and not just in the hyperreality of pop culture, fiction, and drama, but said by real people in real legal settings. It is worth thinking about – what do we mean when we say the law is sacred?

[Mild warning for the rest of this post: I’ll be comparing the law to organised religion. My opinion on religion is based on the assumption that religion, and religious institutions specifically, are man-made. This post neither insists on nor denies the existence of God – a God in which I myself believe – but proposes that religion, not God, is an invention born of human interpretation, human construction, and human error. So if you’re particularly orthodox-religious, you may want to avoid this post. Or, you may want to read on – it’s not that offensive and you may find that having your beliefs challenged is an affirmative experience. Either way…]

So what exactly makes the law “sacred”? Well, it’s worth thinking about what exactly “sacredness” – or sanctity – means. Sanctity is something that, in the religious tradition, can essentially be attached to anything, if enough people agree on it. Much like monetary value, the sanctity of an object, or experience, is not inherent, but is basically a label applied by outside sources. There are examples of this everywhere, from currency devaluation to Li’l Sebastian to, well, so much of organised religion. To an atheist, transubstantiated bread is still just bread. It’s only the opinion of the congregation – the collective will, if you will – that makes it mean anything more.

And what does sanctity entail? It implies some form of otherworldly respect – this sacred object/experience, whatever it be, is due a reverence that we don’t simply offer to other people. It implies that this sacred thing somehow belongs to something greater than us, and so it’s not within our rights to (for lack of a better phrase) mess with it.

You can probably see where I’m headed with this. The whole point of the law as it applies in modern (especially Western) society is that none of us can mess with it. The whole point is that it applies to all of us, and is subject to none of us, because it is something greater than all of us. No-one – as we so often need to point out to our guilty leaders – is above the law.
Moreover, even though the law is entirely man-made, and we don’t have any supernatural beliefs to the contrary, we still afford it this level of respect. In most (especially Western) societies, the law is not viewed as some cheap profession but as a noble pursuit, with a greater level of devotion, qualification, and ceremony accompanying it. And even though the law can be passed by legislators or interpreted by judges, and thus to a greater or lesser extent fundamentally changed by these qualified, devoted people, those changing the law do so in the belief that they’re ultimately building something greater than themselves, something which will apply to them as well as to everyone else, and possibly even to their children. Similarly, you will often hear legal experts talking about the “spirit” of the law, as if there is some ethereal consensus of law that exists beyond our control, and the best we can do in the legal setting is to try and channel the spirit, the nature, of that consensus as best we can.
Even-more-over, on the negative side of things, much like any large religious institution, there exist those in positions of power over the law who will abuse it. They will abuse the authority and reverence afforded their position, essentially abusing the sanctity of the law itself, to their own ends.

So, I hope I’ve established by now that the law is very similar in structure and ethos to a kind of religious institution. But you may ask: if (as I’ve said above) religious sanctity is little more than humans attaching value to something that has no intrinsic value, what makes the law sacred – or just more sacred than religion? It’s the very fact that, unlike religion in today’s society, the law applies to all of us. We depend on the law as the framework of our society, and unlike religious institutions, our society is not opt-in-opt-out (depending on how libertarian you are, that may be regrettable). The law is sacred because the foundations of our society depend on it being so. This is even more true, and much clearer, in the scope of international law – governing interactions between countries: the system only holds up if every party agrees that decisions are binding and universally applicable. For us, the law must be treated as sacred or else it doesn’t work.* And, seeing as we’re not currently living in the world of Mad Max, it seems to be working relatively well. Of course it could be working better, because there will always exist some blasphemers out there, but most of us are holding up our end of the bargain.
*this concept has been explored by much finer minds than I, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the form of ‘The Social Contract‘. Look it up.

It’s late, and this post is getting long, so it’s possible I’ve begun rambling again. Ultimately, the law is indeed sacred; its function and value lies entirely in its universal influence and the respect we give it. It may not be ethereal, or supernatural, but somehow its tangibility lends it even more authority.

Here’s one for you: say the alphabet out loud, as usual making sure to name the letters rather than sounding them out (as in, “ayy” for A, “bee” for B, “see” for C etc.).

You’ll find that every vowel only sounds like the way it’s used in conjunction with the ‘magic E’ or ‘special E’ (however you were taught it in school): that is to say, A is pronounced the way it is in “bake” or “cake”, not like in “back” or “cat”; E sounds like “bee”/”see” rather than “bet”/”set”, I sounds like “die”/”pie” rather than “dig”/”pig”, O sounds like “rope”/”hope” not “rot”/”hot”, and U sounds like “tube”/”crude” rather than “tut”/”crud”.

Meanwhile, among the consonants, if you say them in the way of the Queen’s English/Received Pronunciation, or even Standard American, then H and W are the only letters whose ‘names’ give no indication and are really nothing like their sound (R as well in English pronunciation). Most consonants indicate the sound, like D being “Dee”, and even calling X “eks” or C “see” indicates their usage in may frequent cases (e.g. box = boks; ceiling = seeling). But, we call W “double yoo” and H “aitch”.
Interestingly enough, (at least in England) calling H “haitch” is often deemed a sign of a lack of ‘education’ or ‘class’, even though, for the purposes of indicating a letter’s sound, it’s actually more useful than “aitch”.

The case for W may be contested, as it was David Crystal who argued that a “w” sound is the result of an extremely shortened “u” (“uu” or “oo”) sound. For example, sound out “uuitch” “uarm” or “ooait”. You probably said “witch”, “warm”. and “wait”. So, the name “Double U” for W could be argued to be an indicator of its pronunciation, if only vicariously through the pronunciation of U.

In SE England, Australasia, and South Africa, we also call R “ah”, which gives you no indication as to how to pronounce a word like “red”. Meanwhile in America, Northern and Western UK, and Ireland, it’s “arr” (or “orr” in Ireland), which is much more helpful. However, you could point out that calling R “ah” correlates with its usage at the end of a word, as in RP we also say “bah”, “cah”, and “fah”, while they’d call it “ar” and say “bar”, “car”, and “far” in the wider anglosphere.

I have deliberately avoided Y in this post. Its vowel/consonant status is always debated and I thought it would screw up my findings. But strangely, calling Y “why” does indicate its usage at the end of a word in the same way as in the cases of X and R: “fly”, “sky”, etc. So it does fit into that consonant category (for the purposes of this exercise) in that its ‘name’ does sound like its usage, at least for about half the time, but it’s still problematic because it gives no indication of its usage as a consonant. “Why” doesn’t tell you at all how to pronounce “yes”, or “yellow” – but it does tell you how to pronounce “dye” and “lye”. In that sense, it better resembles a vowel.

SO “why”, “eks”, and “ah” are a little bit weird, but it’s “double-yoo” and “aitch” that are the real odd ones out.

[If you’ve got through this post you can probably see know why I called it the “English” alphabet and not the “Roman” alphabet; it’s about our specific usage of Roman letters in English.]

So that’s what I’ve stumbled on today… what I can’t tell you is why. Why do the vowels sound like they’re in conjunction with E,* rather than alone? What makes H, R, W, X, and Y so inconsistent with their names? As a matter of fact, who actually names letters, or how organically do these things evolve? Who decided that Americans would start calling Z “zee” while Canadians would inherit the British “zed”?
Dahned if I know.

*now that I think about it, words like “cake”, “see”, “pie”, “note”, and “tube” are actually far more consistent in pronunciation across the broader anglosphere than “cat”, “set”, “pig”, “not”, or “tub”. Don’t believe me? Try saying the latter set of words in Yorkshire, Canadian, South African, and New Zealand accents and you’ll see immediately.

Back at my alma mater, and in my current masters, the subject I’ve pursued is best described as ‘area studies’. Chinese with Japanese (~75% language, 25% culture/history) under the title of ‘Asian & Middle Eastern Studies’ for my BA, and a mixture of Chinese Law, Japanese History, Taiwanese Society and International Politics of East Asia for my MA.

For many, this seems quite wishy-washy. Indeed, in our modern vocation-driven learning environment, “area studies” doesn’t provide nearly as good an idea of my skills as, say, “law” or “economics” would for others. Even within the humanities, in which, for example, history and anthropology degrees are often (unfairly) derided as not setting students up for the future, they do at least provide you with extensive training in the methodologies* of history/anthropology and so train you for a career in that subject area. Meanwhile, with the variety of topics it covers, ‘Area Studies’ seems to imply more of a “jack of all trades, master of none” approach.

*If you’re not familiar with academia, the methodology is the approach you take to any subject. Simply put, even if you’re writing about the same subject, say the assassination of Bill McKinley, then a historian would take a vastly different approach, consider different factors, and structure a paper differently, from a sociology/political studies/law major.

The shortcomings of area studies were emphasised personally to me quite recently. In a meeting with one of my essay supervisors, she asked about my course generally, and my plans for the future. When I told her about my other modules and that I was hoping to go abroad to do another Masters in East Asian studies (with different modules), she looked concerned and said she was “worried about what direction [I’m] headed in, academically”. Now, she’s a good lecturer, very good at her subject, and I respect the hell out of her, but I kind of resented that.

So if I’m worried about what the area studies label means for my employment prospects, why insist on using it? Why not just say I have a degree in Chinese and Japanese? Well:
A) because I set quite high standards for myself and I don’t consider my own level of either Chinese or Japanese to be degree-level – not compared to my peers who only took one or the other, and certainly not these days. The last thing I want to do is mislead someone into thinking I’m fluent in both languages (though I do have a working knowledge of both) and come out looking like an idiot when I can’t translate to the standard they need.
B) because to say my degree trained me to speak Chinese and Japanese would be to neglect the many and wonderful things that the non-language-based learning has introduced me to. While I love languages, it was learning about things like Confucianism and Mohism, like the Gempei War, the Meiji Restoration and Dr. Sun Yat-sen that really made East Asia a world that I wanted to discover. Arguably, without learning the languages, I couldn’t have discovered those things, but there are many great scholars before me who have done the translation legwork, and so much of this is now available in English. This is by no means to deny the utility of studying languages, and my languages in particular, but just that I feel the true value of my education so far has not derived solely from a fluency in one or two languages, but from that and everything else that I have discovered about a world still so far removed from our own.

So that’s why I cling to the label. Moreover, I’m proud to, and I’m actually glad that I chose the multidisciplinary, jack-of-all-trades approach. This is because, while I’ve not spent three years studying history, or politics, etc, at the postgraduate level, I have at least been given a pretty decent grounding in all of those methodological approaches. And thanks to the fact that I’ve studied one particular area of the world in depth, I have a decent grounding in those methodologies as pertains specifically to an area that not many people have experience of. As far as (academic) career prospects are concerned, I may not be able to jump straight into foreign policy institutes, but I do have enough knowledge that if I wanted to pursue that path, with a little elbow grease and a little willingness to start at the lower levels, it’s still a viable option. Imagine it like a long corridor, with many different doors. Each piece of expertise can get you into one suite, and once you’re in, you can get further and further into that suite with the grounding you’ve been given. I may not be able to get beyond the entrance hall of any particular suite, but so many more doors on that corridor feel open to me.

And ultimately, those open doors – not just in careers, but in life – are the most important thing to me. By studying what I like to study from so many different angles, I feel truly enlightened. In my Chinese Law course, there are honest historical explanations as to why Chinese law on freedom of religion is still so stringent (hint: less ‘communism’, more ‘Taipings and Boxers’), and my professor seemed to really appreciate the historical perspectives I could offer. Likewise, there is a real discussion to be had over whether escalations in Chinese/Japanese tensions are easily explained by political models of behaviour or whether there is a deep-seated historical, even sociological, animosity between the two. Especially in places beyond our cultural safety-net of the Western world, you simply can’t understand one aspect of non-Western societies out of context.

One of my best friends is a rather fantastic lawyer in London – studying Chinese Law this year has not made me an expert in law, but it has given me a far greater appreciation for what he and all law students go through, and it’s honestly enriched our friendship. We’ve had long discussions over pints about mediation vs. litigation, and it was on such an informal, fun level that we could have been talking about the football. And that sort of thing is what makes area studies so valuable to me. It may be a slower career path than most, but looking beyond careers, to what it has meant for my life and my views on the world, I am so glad I’ve chosen this path.